Updated 2:45 pm, Thursday, June 27, 2013

A 70-year-old woman with a maggot-infested wound was rescued from this Auburn home, pictured above. KOMO/4 photo

A 70-year-old woman with a maggot-infested wound was rescued from this Auburn home, pictured above. KOMO/4 photo

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A 70-year-old woman with a maggot-infested wound was rescued from this Auburn home, pictured above. KOMO/4 photo

A 70-year-old woman with a maggot-infested wound was rescued from this Auburn home, pictured above. KOMO/4 photo

Police: Maggots may have kept rotting Auburn woman alive

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An Auburn, Wash., woman accused of doing nothing while maggots gnawed at her elderly mother now faces a felony elder-abuse charge.

King County prosecutors in Seattle claim Sherrie Morton, 46, left her 70-year-old mother to rot at the Southeast 315th Street home they shared. The older woman would most likely have died there, had medics and King County Sheriff’s Office deputies not rescued her earlier this month.

Deputies and medics arrived to find the older woman stuck to her bedding. According to charging papers, a deputy looking into the bedroom window saw maggots crawling in a large open wound on the woman’s leg; the bed sheets were soiled with the byproducts of injury and covered in bugs.

As deputies entered the home, Morton emerged from a rear bedroom. According to charging papers, Morton said she’d been living at the home for 13 years and claimed her mother’s injury was only a few days old.

Paramedics came to a different conclusion: The woman had been injured at least a month before, and the septic, gangrenous wound could have taken her leg.

“The maggots may have helped keep (the woman) alive due to the fact that they were eating the rotting skin that was infected and helping to slow the infection,” King County Sheriff's Det. Marylisa Priebe-Olson said in court papers, recounting a statement from a paramedic.

Firefighters and medics dressed in hazardous-material suits pulled the woman from her home and transported her to Valley Medical Center, where she was in critical condition. Medical staff removed hundreds of maggots from her body in the days following her rescue.

Still, the woman claimed to have been well cared for in her home, Priebe-Olson told the court.

“(She) said in the hospital that her care at home was fine,” the detective told the court. “However, (she) did not understand that maggots eating her flesh was not good care.”

Questioned at the home, Morton claimed she had changed her mother's diaper and bedding two days before and that the maggots had appeared the day police arrived, Priebe-Olson told the court. She called 911 five hours after she claimed to have first seen the maggots, the detective continued, and only did so after a friend threatened to do the same.

Morton went on to explain that it took her hours to change her 400-pound mother’s diaper and bedding, and that she used shaving cream to clean her. Asked whether she smelled anything unusual recently, Morton allegedly said, “Yes, rotting flesh.”

A friend reported seeing maggots inside the woman’s wound four days before. Flies circled the room and the older woman complained her legs were “burning.”

Checking on the older woman the day she was rescued, the witness said she “noticed ‘hundreds of maggots’ covering her exposed sores, describing it ‘like a horror movie,’” Priebe-Olson told the court. The purported witness ultimately convinced Morton to call the police.

Examining the home at 2 a.m. the following morning, the detective noted large piles of garbage inside the home. Priebe-Olson noted in her report that the scent of rotting flesh, feces and ammonia was strong even through a protective mask.

Following Morton’s arrest on June 19, Priebe-Olson interviewed the woman a second time. Again, she claimed to have been caring for her mother adequately, the detective told the court; Morton, she said, showed no emotion about her mother’s status.

Morton has been charged with second-degree criminal mistreatment of a dependent person. She remains jailed on $150,000 bail.